Published product not always perfect

Mar 08, 2011

Hi team,

I've been scouring the forums for the last while and haven't seen anything about this issue, but I have a feeling that it must have been dealt with before.  We're putting together a course that is nearing 100 slides long and full of animations (Fly-ins and Fades mostly).

The PPT version runs very smoothly, as expected.  However, there are a few issues that we've encountered with the course once published.  For the most part they're not "end-of-the-world" issues, but they don't sit well with our tame herd of perfectionist developers.  The issues are:

  1. Slow down in animations - The animations are a lot slower after publishing.  Most of the animated objects are PPT text boxes or shapes.  This is a quite a big problem for the current project as it loses the "slick" feel and functionality.
  2. Slight shift in objects - e.g. Shape and text fly in on first slide (like a pop-up).  User clicks next.  Shape and text fly out on new slide.  There is a tiny shift in the position of the objects in between the slide change.
  3. Animations out of sync with each other - There is voiceover for this course, but syncing with that isn't the issue here. The problem is that some animations appear faster than others, despite their timing and speed being the same in PPT.  It makes the appearance of content in the published course seem a little erratic and annoyingly undoes the painstaking custom animation work that we've done in PPT.
  4. White flash when moving backwards in the slide order - we can live with this one, but perhaps there is a solution out there.  Moving forwards from one slide to the next is fine, but there is a break (almost like the slide is refreshing when the user goes backwards).  This is mainly an issue with any pop-up effects that we try to create.

I'm not sure if this will help the diagnosis, but this particular course has a quizmaker quiz in it, which works magnificently compared to the PPT bits. 

I've found that most, if not all, of these problems occur when I publish courses and maybe it's my 3rd world technology that is the root of it all - I'm the one doing most of the publishing.  I'm using PPT '03 and Articulate '09 on Windows XP with a measly 2GB of RAM (time for some upgrades!).   Technology aside though, is anyone else experiencing these problems?

Any help is hugely appreciated!

Thanks

Paul

3 Replies
Brian Batt

Hi Paul,

I would suggest you submit a case by following the steps below.

Please create an Articulate Presenter package, then upload the zip file to our server. You can review how to do this here: 

Send to Articulate Presenter Package – Articulate Presenter ’09 Help

Upload the resulting zip file from your computer to our server using this upload form: 

Articulate Support - Upload Your Files for Review 

Please be sure to include a description of your issue, your version of PowerPoint, version of Windows and version of Presenter '09 which you can find in Help and Support -> About Articulate Presenter. Please also include the URL for this thread so we can follow up with you in the forums.

Phil Mayor

if your animations are set to on click, I think the default is to leave 1 second between each. I have most animations set to fast or very fast, as anything less is painfully slow. It is best to synch your animations as you build each slide, I also preview the slide before moving onto the next to ensure the speed is correct.

I think your other issues are related to flash or flash converstion

Phil

Paul Smit

Thanks Brian, I'll put something together for you guys.

Phil, thanks for the suggestion.  We usually set our animations to "with previous" from the outset (maybe this is causing the issues?) and avoid using "on click".  That said, I have only recently grown wise to the benefits of "on click" when it comes to syncing animations with audio and it's changing my world!  For this project however, we're not needing to sync audio and animation as we want to give people the option to turn the audio off and not have to wait for the animations to finish before reading the slide content, so "on click" has seemed unnecessary.

Regarding the speed of animations, I agree that Fast and Very Fast are in most cases the way to go, but sometimes a touch of Medium is also needed.  The problem that we're having is that speed of the animations in the flash output are sometimes different to how we set them in the PPT.  Previewing each slide (using Articulate's preview option) before moving on may be the way around this though.  Thanks for the input!

- Paul

This discussion is closed. You can start a new discussion or contact Articulate Support.